Good progress is being made in doing away with the experiment of privately run prisons, but it needs to move faster, as this story is outright horrifying and should result in the immediate outlawing of private prisons, nevermind the theoretical arguments advanced by myself and many others.
Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.”
In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care. [AP]
And so we see private justice institutions influencing justice, in an illicit manner, in order to elicit more profits. And never mind the damage to the children !!!
It’s appalling and potentially highly damaging to society.
I do hope this quashes any more pro- private prison arguments.
